Trust matters
Trust has become a luxury item in today’s chaotic environment. Companies have started emphasizing “trust”, trying to make it to the top of your value chain. “The nature of trust is undergoing a dramatic shift in contemporary society. We are moving away from a top-down relationship with established institutions and toward a new, horizontal trust relationship with peers. Rating systems are at the heart of this trust revolution. When we know that we’re being rated by others, we become more trustworthy. That, in turn, allows us to trust strangers with even the most sensitive tasks, such as babysitting. Blockchain technology is set to take this revolution even further, allowing us to dispense with third parties and institutions entirely.”
The journey of trust started with small, tight-knit communities and moved through to industrialized societies in which trust was a top-down affair between big institutions and citizens.
At our present age of horizontal trust between networked peers, armed with blockchains and rating systems, the way we detect, and measure trust has drastically changed.
Post-C•VID, there will be even more changes to the concept of “trust” so some of the examples you will read in this book may already be subject to change, such as the rising trend of vehicle sharing, which may stall due to hygienic concerns after C•VID.
This is a great example of how the meaning of trust can change suddenly depending on the situation. Pre-Covid, the major trust concern in sharing a car with strangers was security. Post-Covid, it is hygiene. Go online or scan a newspaper and you’re more than likely to read about the “disruptive” technologies that are currently changing our world. Indeed, on a daily basis, we use services provided by online companies whose names have become synonymous with such changes. So what do Uber, Airbnb and Alibaba have in common, and where did they come from?
#1: Trust opens the door to the world. #2: The third trust revolution in human history is underway.
#3: Institutional trust was never likely to survive the age of digitalization.
New technologies make life more transparent. And, before 2008, our eyes had been opened to how big institutions are really run, and we’d become much more attuned to their failings as a result.
#4: The sharing economy is both a reflection and a product of distributed trust.
What do all these businesses have in common? They create mutual trust between their users.
#5: We become more trustworthy when we know we’re being rated by our peers.
That’s because we all leave a reputation trail behind us. •ther people can see how trustworthy we are by following our trails, just as we can see how trustworthy they are by following theirs.
#6: China plans to implement a national “trustworthiness” rating system for all citizens by 2020.
#7: Blockchain technology will revolutionize the way we trust one another.
Botsman believes that blockchains will revolutionize our trust relationships over the next decade, allowing us to take ever-greater trust leaps and making us wonder how we ever did anything without the technology.